how do your non-aspie kids cope ?

Post Reply New Topic

for those of you out there with non-aspie kids, how do you feel they cope with their sibling(s) AS ?
my 12 year old NT is right in between his 14 year old aspie brother and his 7 year old undx'd sister. sometimes it's hard to know whether the 12 yo is just acting like a pre-teen middle child, or whether he is truly having a difficult time coping. most of the time he does ok, but i can't imagine being that young and having to cope with such things (sibling temper tantrums, stimming, literal thinking, rigidity, pedantry).

I have a 7 year old NT daughter. Mostly she annoys him (AS son). I think what is important is to validate your NTs feelings (talk to him about it) and telling them how much you appreciate him being patient with your AS child.... and also making sure your NT son gets special treatment on occasion.

I also have a 7 year old daughter, and she is the uber-NT child (parties, the phone rings endlessly, etc), while our almost 12 son is doing really well with his AS issues.

The past couple years have been tough and there were times we felt the younger one didn't get all the attention she deserved or even needed, but now as her brother is doiing so much better she is getting doted on by three instead of just two.

She had a period where she mimicked some of his behaviors, but it was a natural growth thing where kids learn by copying. We just redirected her.

we try really hard to give the 12 yo extra attention. at least for now, he is open about talking to me about his frustrations. i worry though that he has become too much of " his brother's keeper", in that they both hang out with the same group of boys~whereas previously the 12 yo hung out with other kids...the 12 yo seems to keep close tabs on his brother, and tries to make sure that the 14 yo doesn't get himself into too much trouble.

My NT daughter does well, she is almost 5 years younger than my son and she seemed to find his humor funny and they got along as well as any other brother and sisters. There really isn't an issue other than when he has had melt down she gets scared and keeps a close eye on him to make sure he's okay and sometime she can talk to him when we can't.

How do your non aspie siblings cope??? are you really that bad to be around?

It's not that Aspie kids are bad to be around, it's that it's different. An Aspie child *sometimes* has higher needs than an NT child which can be a challenge for NT siblings.

ster - I think it's a great, and valid, question. My NT daughter is merely 16 mos old but I can already see that she struggles sometimes with understanding DS's sudden outburts or when he gets angry with her and she hasn't done a thing but sit on the floor reading a book. On the flipside, she thinks he's the funniest person ever and no one can make her belly laugh more than him.

pardon my crassness celtic goddess was not in the best of moods last night


I just wish people would place less emphasis on the daignostic label, I think itt's much healtheir to see the child as a child, rather than the child as a label (eg aspie)

Disorders listed in the DSM are nothing more than guidelines for clinicians to treat specific disorders. It doesn't define a child. Not all problems are caused by AS and not every chiild is going to have every problem associated with AS.

The best way for your non affected siblings to cope is to give them the understadning that eeryone is unique and idfferent in their own way. Everyone has their strengths and weaknesses, they need to imagine what this world would be like if we were a bunch of lemmings.

Your other childnren's ability to cope depends on their ability to get along with other children in general.

Now I am not trying to dismiss some of the difficults AS children have, but I think their needs to be more focus on the iissues the child is having rather tahn a bunch of alphabet soup such as "AS": or "NT"

No worries.

I agree completely with that you're saying. There's not a segregation in our house of NT/AS. But on a forum when you're talking about two different kids, it's easier to refer to them in that way.

The same things can happen between any two sibs.

My older two kids are both "NT". They are now 24 and 25. As children, the older one (dd) was sick a lot, in and out of hospitals and constantly going to one specialist or another. Because of that the younger sib, (ds) lost out on attention alot (esp. since I was a single parent with a disappearing ex). It made him angry later, and we had to work through that. Now he's a great dad to his own ds. Unfortunately dd grew so accustomed to always being the center of attention that when she had a child motherhood wasnt' for her, so I "became" a mom again to another dd.

I dunno how my brothers did with me but I Know I was annoying to them and they were annoying to me. That is normal of course for all siblings. I can remember my mother telling my brothers when I was 14, "Your sister has Aspergers."

i'm 3 years older than my AS little brother. I realize, now that i'm an adult, that whatever i had to deal with (i was picked on and harshly bullied as being "the freak's sister") was probably nothing compared to what he had to, and still has to, deal with. But at the time, when we were kids, i'm afraid i made it harder for him a lot of the time. Nobody ever told me that he wasn't behaving "normally" because of something he couldn't change, or because of a choice he couldn't make, so i blamed him for it - i so, so desperately wanted a "normal little brother" and i picked on him a lot and expected him to do things he couldn't and was angry when he didn't do them. so, no, i didn't cope very well, and i suppose having survivor's guilt now i'm still not coping as well as one might hope for. But he wasn't diagnosed until he was 22ish (even though he'd been seeing a lousy psychiatrist for nearly a decade by then), so i can guess that having parents who are aware of and can discuss the issue w/ their NT kids might help - this might be one of the places where having an early diagnois could really be a grounding, solid thing.

thebazil~ it's so good to hear from you. i hope that we are the kind of parents that our kids will feel comfortable talking to.